


Awkward Phase

by Jaela



Series: SASO2015 Fills [2]
Category: Free!
Genre: M/M, Makoto and Nagisa and Sousuke appear only inasmuch as they are mentioned whoops, This is mostly Rin-centric basically, canon compliant-ish?, light adolescent angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 09:43:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4096231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaela/pseuds/Jaela
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rin goes to Australia and realizes that he's super-gay, basically</p>
<p>Fill for SASO2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awkward Phase

**Author's Note:**

> For the SASO prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _"I am secretly in love with_  
>  _Everyone that I grew up with_  
>  _Do my crying underwater_  
>  _I can’t get down any farther"_  
>  _\- Demons by The National_
> 
>  
> 
> I wanted this to be a lot longer and more introspective, but I got sick at an inconvenient time and wrote most of this through the haze of a low-grade fever. I'd like to come back and write a sequel of sorts eventually!

Rin never, ever knew he was in love. He knew he was a romantic, sure—about as well as he knew he liked spicy food and preferred to wear his hair kind of long. It wasn’t a huge part of his life, but it was there.

Until Australia.

It could have been the new view of the big, wide ocean from a different shore. It could have been the vital charge of actively pursuing his dreams. It might also have just been something as boring and  _un_ romantic as the onslaught of hormones. But something in Rin changed.

At first, it was just noticing what was around him. Noticing the high energy of other swimmers and watching the way their bodies moved through the water. No big deal, it was normal to pay attention to swimming. That was nothing worth worrying about. But when it turned into noticing other members of the school stretching, or changing, or just hanging out in street clothes doing absolutely nothing swimming-related… well, that was more difficult to explain.

The first time he saw another boy tug off his jeans to reveal he’d been wearing jammers underneath, Rin felt the air leave his lungs like one blunt blow to his chest. He realized he could either get embarrassed or angry, so he chose angry. Angry that it reminded him of Haru. Angry that something as simple as that affected him so much. Angry that when he blinked and rubbed his eyes, it wasn’t Haru standing there.

It was possibly even more irritating that the next time, it was just seeing a nobody with broad shoulders running into the surf one weekend at the beach that stopped Rin in his tracks. The guy didn’t even look like Makoto, aside from the easy set of his muscles, but Rin found himself wondering if Makoto would look like that before long. If he’d already started to fill out even more. Just imagining that made him want to lie down and bury his face in the sand.

Strike three was noticing that one of the other guys had left his goggles behind in the locker room one day and shouting, “Hey, wait up!” It was hard to even catch up and hand over the missing item because, even though he’d said it in English, Rin couldn’t get over how very  _Nagisa_  he had sounded. He’d meant to pack up for the day, but since he wasn’t even dressed yet, he marched indignantly back to the pool and flung himself back in the water. A montage of every lingering glance Nagisa’s eyes laid on Haru played behind Rin’s eyes, and it became abundantly clear all at once that Nagisa probably had this same damn problem. Only he seemed to have the advantage of not getting flustered and bitter about it.

He considered writing to Nagisa about it, but it was way too embarrassing, even if he tried to allude to it vaguely in some kind of code. Maybe Sousuke, then—but when he tried that, his pencil lead kept breaking over and over before he even noticed how hard he’d been pressing down. Completely useless.

One day a classmate dragged him along to a Japanese-English bilingual bookstore, and he forgot about the association between nostalgia and pain long enough to wander the shelves, eyes twinkling, feeling almost at home. The listless staff had no problem with anyone lingering to browse, either, so Rin skimmed just about everything he could get his hands on—gossip mags, cookbooks, history texts. When no one was looking, he flipped idly through a few volumes of shoujo manga, too. He found a wispy illustration of a softly-smiling girl nestled between two others on a wide futon, all three of them dozing contentedly with entwined fingers. He snapped the book shut and shoved it back onto the shelf with a derisive click of his tongue. As  _if_  there could be friendships like that. If that was even friendship at all. There was absolutely no point in imagining himself huddled between Haru and Makoto, peacefully dozing while enveloped in their shared warmth. That would be a really stupid thing to think about.

There was nothing he could do about it at all until that fateful winter break. He hadn’t planned to see anyone at all, but that wasn’t what was written in the stars for Rin, and he had never been one to doubt things like fate.

“You could have called me,” Haru mumbled into the cold air.

Before Rin even noticed what he was saying, he was being more honest than he’d intended.

“I mean, that would have been kinda embarrassing.”

But that wasn’t even the half of it.


End file.
